Dateline
Spreading the survivorship word throughout New England
Each month at the South Boston Community Health Center, a handful of cancer survivors visits with a team of survivorship specialists, including a nurse practitioner and social worker, to receive guidelines and referrals for follow-up visits and screenings. Once only available at Dana-Farber's main campus, these services are now expanding beyond the Longwood Medical Area.
This pilot clinic is one of several projects launched by the newly formed New England Survivorship Consortium to help educate survivors and caregivers in both urban and rural settings in Massachusetts and New Hampshire about possible long-term effects of cancer and its treatment. The effort is led by the Perini Family Survivors' Center at Dana-Farber and funded in part by the Lance Armstrong Foundation.
"We want to ensure that high-quality services are available to all cancer survivors, and that every community-based clinician has access to established treatment and screening guidelines for survivors," comments Lisa Diller, MD, director of the Perini Center and clinical director of Pediatric Oncology for Dana-Farber/Children's Hospital Cancer Care.
Another pilot project, with New Hampshire Oncology-Hematology PA (a multioffice medical practice), aims to enhance communication between primary-care physicians (PCPs) and oncologists, and to expand the number of oncologists who produce follow-up plans to help patients transition away from active treatment. In a recent California survey, PCPs said they could provide better care if they had formal guidelines from the oncologists who treated survivors.
On the pediatric side, consortium leaders are adapting for wider use a Dana-Farber handbook for moving off treatment. It will contain a history of each survivor's cancer care, information about late effects, tips for healthy eating, and resources available in the community. Patients and families at the Institute played a role in the handbook's creation.
"We hope to empower survivors to advocate for themselves and ask questions about their past and future care because we believe that good cancer survivorship care is good preventive medicine," says Dana-Farber's Maureen Flynn, project coordinator for the consortium.
